m y r e c o v e r y s t o r y

I’ve always been a thin person.I was thin when I was a little kid. I was thin when I was bullied all throughout elementary school.Thin in high school and in college, despite hardly ever exercising and eating endless amounts of mediocre dorm and fast food. ​But I was never as thin as when I thought I wasn’t.Because for years I suffered from anorexia nervosa, orthoexia, and general anxiety.

I’d always heard stories about ‘anorexics’ and seen these photos of girls who were so desperately and painfully thin, with bones jutting out and sallow, gaunt faces.

But that wasn't me, right? what I saw when I looked in the mirror wasn’t a skeleton - so how could I be one of those people? It just wasn’t possible.

But it was.

After a series of events leading to, what my therapist would later describe as inexorable anxiety, I had my first panic attack. It was the product of “too much on my plate” I suppose --- planning a wedding, buying a house, and adopting a very sick dog all at the same time.

After that, I didn’t eat. I couldn’t eat. The thought of food made me feel sick, and I felt nauseous and tense from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning to the second I fell asleep at night. I was a walking zombie for ten days straight, barely going through the motions at work and at home.

And because of that, I lost about 10 pounds. And that first morning when I was able to look myself in the mirror -- when I saw how that weight had just melted off of me -- a dark part of me was happy.

How had I let myself get so big? I thought, so disgusting? so fat? I needed to make more changes, I thought. I needed to make adjustments. I cut my calories dangerously low - to about 5 to 600 a day. I upped my time at the gym to more than two hours a day, almost every day. I skipped breakfast and lunch, and took over the role of preparing all our dinners at home so that I could control my portion size and keep my calorie intake as low as possible.

I got dressed and undressed in the dark because I felt disgusting. I felt hideous. I didn't want my man to look at me, because I felt like nothing.

For years, my body didn’t belong to me. It belonged to my anorexia.I let HER fill the mould of my own self worth.

She was with me when I tried on wedding dresses, forcing me to choose the one I felt least fat in. She would whisper in my ear every time I bought groceries. She would drag my eyes downward as I watched strangers walk past, comparing their thighs, their arms, their stomachs to mine.

Until, three years of living like that — standing in the middle of my kitchen with the spatula in my hand, my husband said, “let me help you make dinner” … And the idea of not being able to control my meal sent me into panic, and I completely shut down.I sat in the kitchen for hours, feeling the waves of panic rushing over me, my arms and legs crossed and wrapped around me with muscles so tight my entire body hurt the next morning. And I remember my husband looking at me, and trying to say the right thing, Because he knew. But he couldn’t form the right words. And all l I could force myself to say was, “I think something’s wrong with me.”

And a few days later, I made an appointment with a therapist, And that simple act of reaching out to another human, humans who wanted to help, who KNEW how to help, changed my life.

She would ask me things like, “why do you think you’re feeling this way?” and “how are your behaviors making the situation better or worse?” and to be honest … I had no idea. But what I did know - what I figured out - was that I valued, above anything else, the size and shape of my body. I valued what I looked like, over what I felt like.

And together we made good progress. I started the Minnie Maud program of eating, where i stopped all forms of exercise cold turkey, and consumed upwards of 3,000 calories a day - (which, for those of you who haven’t suffered from an eating disorder, might seem like a lot, but for a starving body it’s not). But I also realized that recovery from an eating disorder is so much more than just the physical. Healing your body is just a small part of it.

So I started an Instagram account of my own and I only followed people who encouraged me; who were also in recovery; who promoted things like body positivity, self love, feminism, knowing your worth.

And now it's my turn to do that for someone else.

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